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So, when the vaccines were proved to 90%+ effective at preventing people from getting COVID, science communication world (including me) was quick to have some caveats. One being that the vaccines weren’t proven to prevent you from spreading the disease.
Not that it wouldn’t prevent that...just that we didn’t know yet.
That has quickly morphed into, “It won’t protect against you infecting other people.”
Which is also untrue. We just don’t know. We are attempting to communicate uncertainty, but it’s like people can’t hear it.
That has quickly morphed into, “It won’t protect against you infecting other people.”
Which is also untrue. We just don’t know. We are attempting to communicate uncertainty, but it’s like people can’t hear it.
And if you privately ask any person who knows about this, they’ll tell you that, yeah, almost definitely it will decrease you odds of infecting other people, possibly to near zero. But we talk honestly about what we do and don’t know. That’s the whole job.
And COVID has surprised us before with asymptomatic transmission. But, just for clarity. We don’t know if vaccinated people will be a big infection vector. But we will know a lot more about that soon.
But what I think is so interesting here is how god damn hard it is to communicate uncertainty. We don’t know A TON about covid, but what we don’t know is discarded as useless, or imagined as certainty of the opposite, when actually, unknowns are vital to keep in mind.
This thread turns out to have found a place in an ongoing discussion in the SciComm world. Here are two takes that resonated with me.
First from @zeynep https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1341235643276554240
First from @zeynep https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1341235643276554240
Second from @ClimateOfGavin who, being in climate communication, has seen this all before. https://twitter.com/climateofgavin/status/1341268597776244736
But I also think some people are worried about giving people any excuse to not wear masks. So it’s also a question of what the job is. Is the priority to spread the most accurate information possible? Or is it to increase compliance with CDC guidelines. I honestly don’t know.
But I do think that going with @zeynep’s “it probably will, but we’re waiting for more information” language prevents the misunderstanding we’re in now, is more accurate than “we don’t know”, and hopefully communicates the need for caution.
And also, it lets us avoid yet another “OH SO THEYRE CHANGING THEIR MINDS AGAIN” moment that I honestly think is undermining people’s faith in science.
My instinct is to say, “this isn’t my fault, people should get that uncertainty is normal and also probably temporary” but my job is to communicate science, so that thought is ultimately destructive to the whole endeavor.
